Leon Tarasewicz

Leon Tarasewicz was born on 14 March 1957 in Walily (also recorded as Stacja Walily), a village in the Podlasie region of northeastern Poland near the Belarusian border, and he comes from the area's Belarusian minority community. He studied at the Liceum Sztuk Plastycznych in Suprasl from 1972 to 1977, before entering the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied from 1979 to 1984 and received his diploma in the studio of Prof. Tadeusz Dominik.

His work is built from large fields of color applied in horizontal and diagonal bands, an abstraction that draws on the fields, forests, and light of his native Podlasie without depicting them literally. He gained early international visibility with a 1986 solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm and participation in the 19th Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1987. According to the artist's exhibition history, his work appeared in 1988 in the "Aperto '88" section of the Venice Biennale and in the group show "Art at the Edge" at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; in 2001 he represented Poland at the 49th Venice Biennale.

Tarasewicz has received a series of major Polish honors, including the Jan Cybis Award (1998), the Polityka Passport Award (2000), the Silver Medal "Zasluzony Kulturze Gloria Artis" (2005), the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2011), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Bialystok (2022). According to gallery and institutional sources, he currently lives and works in Walily and heads the Painting department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

Tarasewicz is consistently framed by Polish museums and critics as one of the country's most significant living abstract painters, someone who has pushed color-field painting toward an almost physical record of landscape and light. His trajectory, from a regional art school in Suprasl, to a diploma under Tadeusz Dominik, to Aperto '88 at the Venice Biennale and later a Polish national presentation at the 2001 Biennale, is treated in Polish sources as a steady climb from provincial origin to the center of the national art establishment, reinforced by the state honors and the 2022 honorary doctorate from the University of Bialystok.

Tarasewicz's auction market is centered in Poland and denominated primarily in Polish zloty. His current auction record is "Bez tytulu" (Untitled), a triptych from 1988, which sold for PLN 1,500,000 including buyer's premium (hammer price PLN 1,250,000) at DESA Unicum in Warsaw, a sale the Polish art market outlet Rynek i Sztuka reported on 27 March 2024 as a new record for the artist; the exact calendar date of the sale itself was not independently confirmed. Internationally, Bukowskis in Stockholm recorded a hammer price of SEK 560,000 for "Ohne Titel" and SEK 320,000 for a separate untitled canvas in an October 2024 sale, both well below the DESA Unicum record. Galerie Nordenhake is the gallery most explicit about ongoing representation, with a current CV and repeated solo shows; several Polish galleries and institutions describe collaboration or collection relationships rather than stating formal representation outright.

Tarasewicz's market is thin relative to his institutional stature: most public sales are in Poland, denominated in PLN, and the current auction record was only reported in March 2024, meaning there is limited long-run price history to draw on. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, so provenance and signature verification through the auction house or through Galerie Nordenhake matter more than usual. Collectors should also expect that reported results in SEK, USD, or PLN are not always directly comparable without care, since currency and buyer's premium conventions differ by house, and the small number of headline sales means any single result can move the perceived market disproportionately.